While taking care of some business at the local courthouse here in beautiful Northeast Kansas, an officer came barreling through the hallway, making everyone clear space for him to march a young woman, whom he had just arrested, down the hall. He sat her down, momentarily, on a bench. Then she recognized me, having met me in the past, (this is a small community, and her children are close in age to my children) and called out my name. She explained to me that the police had taken her into custody and had left her children, ages five and seven, by themselves! She wanted me to call her mother on my cell phone and ask her to go watch them...that was all. As I began to oblige, the officer grabbed my arm and snatched my cell phone away from me. While I continued to grasp the cell phone, he hollered, "If you help her, I will arrest you, too!" He stopped me from dialing, but found himself not technically savvy enough to remove the phone number, and he further screamed, "End it!", letting go of both yours truly and the cell phone.
My husband explained to me that earlier in the day, there had been a big drug bust in the area, and quite a few people had been arrested for violating prohibition laws. He was also of the opinion that the officer had put the woman in this position deliberately, so as to force her to choose, when deciding who to call, between her mother and her lawyer. Furthermore, if social services had been sent to her home, and taken the children, the mother could also be charged with child neglect and abandonment, even though the police had taken her into custody. And asking me to call her mother to take care of the children had somehow become criminalized behavior.
What the hell is the matter with everyone in Northeast Kansas? Times were, during my misspent youth, my big mouth and my boozy breath were factors that almost got me arrested, more than once. Now that I am "old"......as per my childrens' descriptions.....and a little more conservative, no one looks at me and thinks "outlaw", these days. But I'm gonna get arrested for calling someone's mother to go babysit her children? Kansas law enforcement, have you lost your minds? Or is this another way you feed the
human trafficking market you call a foster care system?
3 comments:
it does feed the trafficking market. it's kids for cash and many benefit off the backs of children. nice post.
Share this post everywhere you can. It has become standard procedure because the victims are not old enough to write about it, and make others aware, and the parents are often not aware of their own rights, and after they have been criminalized, no one listens to them. As long as no one writes about these things, it continues.
That's amusing, but Marysville would have to get some actual football players first!
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